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writing exercises?

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Start a story with a girl being killed, then work backwards and find out how she got there.

Sit on your ass and don't actually write, just laze around the cult. If this website wasn't here, half of us wouldn't be writers, yet if it went away, I bet half would actually manage to write something. Stupid internet. So many distractions.

Free writing for ten minutes, but without the starting point that the Cult's exercise provides. In other words, you just write down whatever words and descriptions and whatever come to your head to freshen your word palette... without thinking about what you're typing, just typing. Then, when and if you get stuck, you write stuck over and over again until you find new words to say. Writing the same word many times automatically makes your brain think of new things to say just to get out of that repetition.

think of a scenario, craft a scene that has more than two characters. dialogue, description, all of that.. maybe a drug deal, in a house or at a park or something. write it out in a first person. create a character and write it out. then rewrite it in first person a few more times, using the other characters' words. that way you have a full understanding of the scene. then try and put it in a third person limited, controlled down to the best voice for your protagonist. then try crafting the same scene yet again using omniscient. a fun and useful exercise.
-kabol

In all seriousness, though, I often like to take an experience from my life and remove it from it's original context. Then apply the same situation to my narrator or another character and flesh out how this fictional person would react in the same situation I experienced. I don't like my writing to get too far away from the realm of my real experience, and this way I can include specific detail about the experience and still use it as a plot device in a fictional work.

4) Now, if you're feeling brave, pick one of the stories for a chapter in your new novel.

The biggest thing is to write every day no matter what your mood is because you need the practice, you need to remain close to the story, and you never know when something GREAT will happen. And then there's the whole revision thing, which stops most writers from achieving their dream.

im lazy, and i didnt see if anyone else had mentioned this, but THE 3AM EPIPHANY is the exercise book i recommend to people. they are fun, and challenging, and the actually make you a better writer. none of that describe your favorite color to a blind person bullshit. no numb sensations. none of that kind of shit.

The one standard one is pick a random object in your room or wherever your at and think about how it got there. Usually you can create a pretty good story out of that. Example: Coffee mug, belonged to my father, who was given to him by his dad after he came back from WWII. So I would probably go with something about the coffee mugs journey through the war through my dad's growing up till it reached my pathetic life sitting in this room at this computer desk.

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